From Knockout to Nocaut

The Use of Anglicisms in Revista Estadio 1942-1982

1 Introduction

Sports are practiced, consumed, and enjoyed; but mostly sports are talked and written about. In non-English speaking societies, talking and writing about sports involves a great deal of borrowed terminology from English, the lingua franca of modern sports. As Latin American societies embraced modern sports in the early twentieth century, anglicisms entered local language through newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Some of those words became part of regular language, others mutated into English-rooted Spanish words, but several disappeared. This study sheds light on the written usage of anglicisms in sporting magazines, by analyzing over 40 years of publications of Revista Estadio, a Chilean sports magazine published in Santiago between 1941 and 1982, with the aid of text analysis techniques. The data suggests that English lexical borrowing reached its peak in the early 1940s, followed by a downward trend in both frequency and variety of anglicisms throughout the decades. The highest point in the usage of English terms coincided with an increasing nationalist fervor around the practice of sports by social reformers and government officials, which, however, never seemed to collide with the widespread influx of a foreign vocabulary. Unlike Argentina’s Peronist regime, which strictly regulated the use of anglicisms in the media, Chile’s specialized sporting print and media communications enjoyed no restrictions in the use of a borrowed lexicon.

2 The Source and its Context: Revista Estadio 1941-1982

In the mid-twentieth century, the weekly publication Revista Estadio marked a turning point in the history of sports tabloids in Chile. Before it, specialized sporting magazines had been mostly short lived enterprises, struggling to remain in circulation, and suffering from chronic financial insolvency. Estadio managed to secure a place in the Chilean printing industry, by bringing together an intense graphic style, with a diversity of content that included straight-lead game descriptions, season previews and wrap-up stories, chronicles and columns.¹The ethos of the magazine aligned with the state-centered modernizing strategy championed by the Frente Popular governments, between 1936-1941.² Estadio crafted a vision that emphasized national sentiments, the centrality of sports to Chilean identity and the values of male domesticity and manhood. In its 40 years of existence, Revista Estadio was able to remain in circulation throughout a dramatic political cycle that witnessed the rise and fall of the developmental state, the democratization and political mobilization of Chilean society, the breakdown of the democratic regime and the first ten years of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial rule. Since the 1990s, a growing body of research has explored Revista Estadio’s connection with 1940’s Latin American populism and developmentalist strategies³, its role in supporting middle class reform and upward mobility in the 1940s and 1950s, and its relevance as a cultural medium reproducing narratives of racial unity, masculinity and male citizenship.⁴

¹ Eduardo Santa Cruz, Prensa y Sociedad en Chile, Siglo XX, Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2016, 115

² Eduardo Santa Cruz, “Prensa deportiva y desarrollismo en Chile: el caso de la Revista Estadio”, Revista Mapocho, n° 71, 2012, 262

³ Pedro Acuña, “Playing Across the Andes: Sports media and populism in Argentina and Chile”. Journal of Latin American Studies. 2019;51(4):855-882.

⁴ Eduardo Santa Cruz, Prensa y Sociedad en Chile, 116. For a detailed study of the link between masculinity and sports in Chile see Brenda Elsey, Citizens and Sportsmen Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

By analyzing the frequency and usage of anglicisms in a period of 40 years, this study aims to explore a textual and linguistic angle of the globalization of sports. The use, adaptation, and transformation of English sporting specialized terminology overtime is a historically situated process, as well as a linguistic phenomenon. English provided the nomenclature that accompanied the emergence of a myriad of social relationships brought by the massification of sports. Since the anglophone sports lexical set retained important variations depending on the athletic discipline, and the social class of its practitioners and audiences, anglicisms are a window to the interaction between social classes, institutions, knowledge producers, audience and the mass media. English specialized vocabularies are markers of an increasing transnational process of cultural and economic interaction. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, anglicisms have been continuously transferred from the English-speaking world into areas such as technology, science, communications, mass culture, and sports, a process that “evoke[s] the hegemony of Anglo- Saxon countries, especially the United States, in the international community.”⁵ In Chile and Latin America, the explosion of anglophone sporting vocabulary signals a process of rapid urbanization that gave way to the commodification and massification of modern sports. As transnational mass culture interacted and combined with local popular cultures, English terminologies entered, remained and negotiated their way into Spanish language until today.

⁵ Felix Rodriguez González, “Anglicisms in contemporary Spanish. An overview.” Atlantis 21, no. 1/2 (1999), 108. For a

3 Methodology

The methodology of this study is quite straightforward: counting English words in a corpus of forty years of publications of Revista Estadio, with the help of computational methods. The goal is to analyze the frequencies of anglicism usage in order to discover hidden patterns in lexical borrowing overtime, and analyze the results against an historical background. As Kellen Funk and Lincoln Mullen rightly suggest, Text Analysis methods are “most useful when mixed with more traditional approaches for forming historical questions and reading historical evidence.”⁶ Was the use of borrowed lexicon affected by nationalists’ views attached to the practice of sports? Do changes in the use of English terms relate with the professionalization of sports journalism, and different trends in the commodification and commercialization of sports? Those questions frame the exploration of English vocabulary not only for the realm of sports media, but also for a wider array of transnational circulations of knowledge between the English and the non-English world.

⁶ Kellen Funk, Lincoln A. Mullen, “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice”, The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 132–164, 144 https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.132

Although straightforward on its methods, setting this project up involved a considerable amount of data preparation. Curating the corpus required several data transformations, from the original pdf files available in Memoria Chilena, a virtual library supported by Chile’s Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, to the construction of datasets. The data was constructed using a trimestral sample of the published numbers per each year, from 1942 to 1982. The transformation involved the construction of an infrastructure in python to transform, clean, preprocess, and scrutinize the texts, preserving their location in the historical timeline. By closely reading the magazine, I selected 46 English terms and its Spanish equivalents -mostly nouns and some verbs-, and tracked their frequencies. The results were stored in independent python dictionaries, and then transformed into two types of data frames: one with the raw frequencies, and another with a ratio of usage, that is, the English frequency normalized against the Spanish term. From there, the frequencies and ratios are analyzed in general, and by following the historical movement of a set of relevant terms. Check the notebooks, dictionaries, pdfs and txts in the github repository.

I deliberately did not include in the list of terms the cases of hybridization or graphemic variation referred to the names of the athletic disciplines, as in the transformation of football into fútbol; however I did include some forms of of replacement and graphemic adaptation like the transformation of knockout into nocaut. Out of the 46 terms, Most of the sample corresponds, in strict linguistic terms, to nouns (83%), verbs (13%) and adjectives (4%), although they were mostly used by sportswriters as nouns. When needed, this study draws on Linguistics to understand the complex typologies of exchanges and borrowings between languages. However, it is important to note that the construction of linguistically accurate characterization of the transformation of anglicisms is outside of the scope of this project. This study aims specifically to contribute to the field of Digital History, by applying the insights of several sub-fields like Diachronic Vocabulary Change and Lexical Change, to the historical analysis of sports, media and culture in Latin America. The use of historical linguistics.

4 From Knockout to Nocaut

“And the regrettable eagerness to use these foreign words in sports language has reached such extremes in Chile that fans of this kind of entertainment, from the great sports journalists of the newspapers to the modest working class child who can barely push a ball, have a truly overwhelming vocabulary of foreign technical words”

Rodolfo Oroz, El Castellano de Nuestros Deportistas (The Spanish of our Athletes), 1927, 238

In 1953, the linguist Lidia Contreras published Los Anglicismos en Lenguaje Deportivo Chileno (Anglicisms in Chilean sport language), the first comprehensive study about the use of anglicisms in Chile. According to Contreras, sportswriters used over 400 anglophone words on a daily basis, which included English words, calques, and English rooted terminology. Although Contreras’s 161-page study was mostly dedicated to linguistics, she also addressed some of the anxieties that Chile’s intellectual elite had regarding the widespread use of anglicisms: “Some people believe –expressed Contreras— that the language should be purged of foreign terms that corrupt and suffocate it. We believe that this purist criterion is exaggerated”⁷.

⁷ Lidia Contreras, “Los anglicismos en el lenguaje deportivo chileno.” Boletín de filología 7 (1952): 177-341, 179

The fear of blemishing Spanish through the use of foreign words was longstanding. In 1927, the philologist Rodolfo Oroz, pointed out that English words “represent a foreign body in our vocabulary, no matter how much it is said that these are generally accepted words.”⁸ In the nineteenth century, the Salesian priest and lexicographer Camilo Ortuzar considered the use of foreign words as “noxious weeds of our language”⁹. In the same volume, Ortúzar rejected the use of the word meeting in Chilean Spanish as “unbridled Anglicism that spreads and prevails like everything bad”¹⁰. In the mid-twentieth century, both Argentina’s Peronist Populist Regime and Spain’s Franquist Regime, placed limitations on the use of foreign terminology in the media, and tried to castellanize imported lexicon, in order to boost nationalists agendas¹¹.

⁸ Rodolfo Oroz, El Castellano de Nuestros Deportistas, Studium. Revista chilena de cultura humanística. Santiago : [s.n.], 1926-1927. v., no. 3 (dic. nov. 1927) p. 238-249, 248

⁹ Camilo Ortuzar, Diccionario Manual de Locuciones Viciosas y de Correcciones de Lenguaje, Santiago: Impresora Salesiana, 1893, 107

¹⁰ Camilo Ortuzar, Diccionario Manual, 210

¹¹ Rodríguez González, Félix. “Variaciones en el uso de anglicismos deportivos.” (2007)

None of these apprehensions seemed to have prevented sports journalists from massively turning to a foreign technical terminology. Although nineteenth-century elites educated in Europe were inclined to import Gallicisms, the massification of sports, and the strong presence of athletics, leisure and technology in the press and radio broadcasting, turned the use of anglicisms into a widespread practice across social classes. Between 1900 and 1942, more than 30 sporting magazines and tabloids were published intermittently in Chile’s most populated cities.¹² Since 1910, when sports were definitely becoming a commercialized commodity, traditional newspapers boosted their sections on deporte, whose topics became independent from social life and leisure¹³.

¹² Some of these magazines had English names like Crack(1937), Los Sports(1923), El Ring (1917), Match(1928). For a detailed account see Eduardo Santa Cruz, Prensa, espacio público y modernización: las revistas deportivas en Chile (1900-1950), 2012, Alex Ovalle, El Viril Deporte, Boxeo, Modernización y Cultura de Masas (1904-1931), Centro de Estudios Bicentenario.

¹³ María, Vásquez Amador, Carmen, Lario, & Paloma López, (2015). Los anglicismos en la prensa deportiva de los 50. Estudios filológicos, (55), 157-176. https://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0071-17132015000100010

Image 1. English terms used in a Tennis Article. Highlithed in colors appear thewords match, sets, score and players. Revista Estadio, October 1943

For Revista Estadio, promoting the sport was endowed with a nationalist and modernizing aura, regardless of the language. The magazine supported sports as a national crusade against alcoholism, gambling and prostitution. They also sought to use athleticism to promote middle-class values, reinforce male domesticity, and restrain revolutionary labor movements.¹⁴ The use of English terms were ideologically and structurally associated with a modernization process. The use of foreign jargon evoked a sense of progress, as sportswriters wielded them to demonstrate their erudition, and to emphasize that sports could be approached in a technical and scientific manner. As Michael Malouf suggests, the ideology of Global English presented anglicisms as a neutral, instrumental, and auxiliary skill for embracing modernity.¹⁵

¹⁴ See both Oscar Peñafiel, “Cuerpos fuertes, conciencias dóciles. La construcción del obrero soñado a través del deporte en la cuenca carbonífera 1920-1950”, and Hernán Adasme, “De la sujeción paternalista a la tutela institucional. La práctica y el espectáculo del boxeo en el mineral El Teniente 1915-1944”, in Enzo Videla, Hernán Venegas y Milton Godoy (Eds), El Orden Fabril. Paternalismo Industrial en la minería chilena 1900-1950, Valparaíso: Editorial América en Movimiento, 2016.

¹⁵ Michael Malouf, Making World English : Literature, Late Empire, and English Language Teaching, 1919-39, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021, x.

Image 2. English terms used in a Soccer Article. Highlighted in green are the words insider, for middlefielder, and scorer, for the player with most goals. Revista Estadio, December 1947.

The increase in anglicisms usage led to a proliferation of their variations. Sportswriters’ knowledge of English wasn’t always beyond a rudimentary level, which created a sheer diversity among neologisms originated in lexical borrowings. The proliferation of printers’ typographic errors, over-correction by editors, and the process of hybridization and castellanization - which involves using the phonetic structure of Spanish to transform foreign words - have resulted in a vast array of variants for semantically related terminologies. These variants were especially noticeable in the discipline names -such as basketball and volleyball- and in verbs like to shoot or to dribble.¹⁶

¹⁶ The variants included basquetball, basketbol, basquetbol, basketbal, among others

4.1 The Analysis

This study includes an array of 46 terms in English, selected by closely reading the sources. The sources included 40 txt files extracted from the pdf documents containing around 15 numbers of Revista Estadio per year. Due to the poor quality of the OCR, which resulted in many words being smudged together, I created several functions¹⁷ that inspected each document as though it was a single string, and extracted the English terms and their frequency into a python dictionary¹⁸. I repeated the same process for their Spanish counterparts. These dictionaries, one in Spanish and one in English per each document, allowed the construction of two document term matrices: one with the raw frequencies and one with the constructed ratios. Differences in plural and singular use of the words were collapsed into the singular variant to improve the analysis¹⁹.

¹⁷ Check the notebooks, Revista Estadio files in pdf format, text files and raw data in the github repository.

¹⁸ This created several issues like the word team being extracted from the word norteamericano. To solve this I simply eliminated all the words that were creating these problems. Prior to tokenizing words, I created several functions to clean up the text and separate as many words as I could. Capital words and Spanish accent marks were crucial to split words apart

¹⁹ The word games is the exception, because the singular version was prone to capture mixture of two Spanish words by error; keeping the final s prevented that.

Code

import re
import numpy as np
import pickle
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
from wordcloud import WordCloud
import matplotlib.colors as mcolors
from matplotlib.colors import ListedColormap

Code

pd.set_option('display.max_columns', None)
df_freq_1942_1982=pd.read_csv(r'/Users/hernanadasme/Projects/estadio_1940_1980/csv/df_intindex_1942_1982.csv', sep=',', index_col = 0)
df_freq_1942_1982.head()
#creating a copy without columns that are mostly 0
df_less = df_freq_1942_1982.drop(columns=['centroforward', 'line','centerforward', 'teams', 'players','shortstop', 'pitchers'])

Code

df_less.head()

	fighter	training	chance	sprinter	ring	lineman	forward	tackle	shot	kick	out	single	crack	referee	sport	boxing	player	standard	knockout	score	team	elgoal	jersey	coach	handicap	catch	dribbling	record	shoot	back	insider	winger	field	second	ranking	match	club	games	foul
1942	1	4	34	20	121	0	32	0	23	0	30	27	244	7	87	8	34	20	1	107	657	5	3	15	5	3	5	292	3	58	26	4	64	20	9	414	553	6	20
1943	11	2	48	27	156	3	40	1	36	4	27	29	455	30	81	0	92	10	5	114	293	3	2	12	4	2	3	339	1	47	40	17	53	15	26	401	437	6	26
1944	3	4	52	39	156	0	67	10	23	3	22	36	276	33	94	1	64	17	7	92	355	2	0	21	24	1	11	276	2	53	50	11	30	14	10	418	353	7	37
1945	7	3	53	16	237	1	75	0	17	2	53	24	221	63	114	0	87	18	16	135	410	2	2	37	17	3	18	356	4	50	71	18	40	7	8	500	402	5	62
1946	0	3	41	5	198	0	86	0	23	0	27	39	117	55	68	2	54	20	7	115	494	0	13	19	23	1	12	305	0	31	77	44	36	9	9	443	371	1	36

A first view of raw data shows a steady decline in the use of anglicisms starting from the early 1960s. In the early 1940s, the variety of terms was wider, and it included a specific terminology for athletic disciplines such as Soccer, Golf, Tennis, Turf, Swimming, Baseball and Ping-Pong. These vocabulary was imported from the U.K. and the U.S. in various degrees; disciplines like Soccer, Tennis, Rugby evidenced a strong British influence, while baseball, basketball, and boxing, had a lexicon mostly borrowed from the U.S. Some words like games and players, single, double, set were used most frequently by sportswriters in articles about tennis, a discipline practiced exclusively by Chilean elites. Soccer terminology included technical nouns about player positions -forward, back, insider, wing-, plus a set of verbs used as nouns like -shoot, kick, tackle, dribble- to refer to actions in the field. Boxing terminology, probably the argot that remained more stable across the years, included terms about boxing’s equipment and personnel like ring, coach, umpire, referee, seconds, and a specific nomenclature for the boxing movements such as uppercut, punch, cross, among others. The verb catch had a slight presence in the corpus, and it was mostly used in the phrase Cath-as-catch-can, an older name for Wrestling. A set of anglicisms like chance ²⁰, record, crack, handicap, club, and ranking, were used across disciplines, and became assimilated into Spanish. Finally, words like sport, crack, and jersey were common in advertisement, both for nonprescription medicine, and sport equipment. Figure 1 displays a word could which represents the most used verbs in the whole corpus. The most used terms were the ones that became regular words in Spanish and were used outside the realm of sports.

²⁰ The word “Chance” underwent a transition from being a gallicism to an anglicism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially introduced from Frecnh by Chilean elites educated in Europe, it later experienced a shift and was readopted as an anglicism, accompanied by a change in pronunciation to align with the Anglophone form. See, Rodolfo Oroz, La Lengua Castellana en Chile, Santiago : Univ. de Chile, Facultad de Filosofía y Educación, 1966, 452. Available in Memoria Chilena, http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-8458.html

Code

# Convert document-term matrix to dictionary
word_freq = dict(zip(df_less.columns, df_less.sum(axis=0)))
# Create wordcloud object
wordcloud = WordCloud(width=600, height=300, background_color="white")
# Generate wordcloud from dictionary

Code

# Plot the wordcloud
wordcloud.generate_from_frequencies(frequencies=word_freq)
plt.figure(figsize=(20, 5))
plt.imshow(wordcloud, interpolation='bilinear')
plt.axis("off")
plt.show()

Figure 1: Word cloud of the most used anglicisms in the corpus. The size of the words represents the frecuency of their usage. Note that some words that completely assimilated into spanish, like match, record, club, sport and crack show the highest frecuency

A sight of a scatter plot with the whole data, shows that the use of English loanwords peaked in the late 1940s but steadily declined in both frequency and diversity starting from the mid-1960s. Despite the overall decline in anglicisms, certain words such as club, team, match, and record remained widely used throughout the 1960s and 1970s. These terms continued to maintain their popularity among sportswriters and journalists during the subsequent decades of the 1970s and early 1980s. Specifically, club emerged as a commonly adopted substitute for the Spanish equivalents equipo (team) and institución deportiva (sports institution). On the other hand, action verbs used as nouns, such as catch, dribble, shoot, tackle, and kick, experienced low frequencies during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and nearly disappeared from the sample by the 1970s. Additionally, words like crack, which referred to exceptional athletes, and score and scorer, which denoted both result of a game and a striker respectively, exhibited a steady decline throughout the studied period, till almost disappearing by the early 1980s. Figure 2 shows the overall decline in the decline total use of anglicisms in the corpus between 1942-1982.

Code

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 4))
for column in df_less.columns:
    ax.scatter(df_less.index, df_less[column], label=column, s=40, alpha = 0.5)

sns.set_style('darkgrid')
sns.set_palette('bright')
sns.set_context('talk')

# compute the trend line for the selected columns
x = df_less.index.values
y = df_less.values
m, b = np.polyfit(x, y.mean(axis=1), 1)

# add the trend line to the plot
ax.plot(x, m*x + b, label='Trend line')

#ax.legend()
ax.set_xlabel('Document')
ax.set_ylabel('Frequency')
ax.set_xticks(df_less.index)
plt.yticks(fontsize=12)
plt.xticks(rotation=45, fontsize=12)
#plt.legend(fontsize='20')
plt.show()

Figure 2: Raw frecuencies of the use of anglicisms between 1942-1982. Scroll sideways to see the whole plot. The plot includes a trend line to emphasize the steady decline in the use of foreign lexicon. Note that words like club (pink dot) team (blue dot), match (brown dot), and record(grey dot), remained very common through the whole period.

A detailed view of 14 terms with total frecuencies of more than 1000 instances in the whole corpus shows a more nuanced picture. Throughout the decades, there was a noticeable decline in the usage of specific soccer terminology. In the 1940s and 1950s, various positions on the field, such as back and centerback, referring to the defensive line and central defender respectively, scorer, denoting a forward or striker, forward, indicating a player in the offensive line, winger, representing a player covering both the left and right lines, and insider, referring to a midfielder, were commonly employed by sportswritters and journalists. However, by the 1970s, these terms began to be replaced by Spanish words such as defensor or zaguero for the defensive lines, mediocampista or volante for insiders, lateral or punta for wingers, and delantero or goleador for forward and striker positions. More specfically, the words back, insider and forward, virtually dissapeared from the sample of raw counts by the early 1970s. Figure 3 shows the overal decline of the 14 most used terms.

Code

df_fil_1942_1982 = pd.read_csv(r'/Users/hernanadasme/Projects/estadio_1940_1980/csv/filtered_1000_final.csv', sep=',', index_col = 0)
#df_fil_1942_1982.head()

Code

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 4))
colors = ['blue', 'green', 'red', 'purple', 'orange', 'cyan', 'magenta', 'yellow', 'lightblue', 'gray', 'pink', 'teal', 'lightgreen', 'navy']

for i, column in enumerate(df_fil_1942_1982.columns):
    ax.scatter(df_fil_1942_1982.index, df_fil_1942_1982[column], color=colors[i % len(colors)], label=column, s=40, alpha = 0.5)   

sns.set_style('darkgrid')
sns.set_palette('bright')
sns.set_context('talk')

# compute the trend line for the selected columns
x = df_fil_1942_1982.index.values
y = df_fil_1942_1982.values
m, b = np.polyfit(x, y.mean(axis=1), 1)

# add the trend line to the plot
ax.plot(x, m*x + b, label='Trend line')

ax.legend(fontsize=6)
ax.set_xlabel('Document')
ax.set_ylabel('Frequency')
ax.set_xticks(df_fil_1942_1982.index)
plt.yticks(fontsize=12)
plt.xticks(rotation=45, fontsize=12)
#plt.legend(fontsize='20')
plt.show()

Figure 3: Raw frecuencies of the 14 most used of anglicisms between 1942-1982. Scroll sideways to see the whole plot and explore the legend.

The decrease in the utilization of soccer terminology in the mid-1950s could be attributed to various factors. While Chile did not impose any governmental regulations on the use of anglicisms in the media, the influence of Argentina’s Peronist policies on anglicisms may have had an impact on the writing style of Chilean magazines. As Pedro Acuña has pointed out, the style and aesthetics of Chilean radio narrators and sports commentators was heavily influenced by the media industry in neighboring Argentina. The controls on the press established by the military regimes between 1943-1946, and the nationalistic tone of Peron’s press control policies, may have influenced the vocabulary used by Chilean sports editors, favoring the castellanization of soccer positions over the utilization of the English counterparts²¹. The transnational continuities between radio and print media allowed for a transitive relationship between the spoken and the printed word, beyond national boundaries. This process aligns with the solidification of soccer as the “people’s sport”, and by the consolidation of fútbol as both the most prevalent and widely practiced sport, and Latin America’s foremost mass media commodity²². The growing popularity of fútbol may have led sportswriters to prioritize Spanish terminology over foreign terms. Figure 4 shows the trajectories of a selection of words with a total frequency of more than 1000 instances in the whole corpus. Note how the terms back, forward, and insider experienced a sharp drop in the number of total appearances per year. Other words that undergone a significant decrease were team, score, and crack, while foul and club were the only terms that evidenced a growing frequency. Figure 5 displays a heatmap of the total frequencies across the corpus, and it highlights how the words club, and to a lesser extent, record remained relatively constant throughout the the decades.

²¹ Pedro Acuña, “Transnational Sports Soundscapes: Soccer Announcers and Radio in Argentina and Chile, 1920s-60s.” Radio journal 19, no. 1 (2021), 88.

²² Mathew Karush, “National Identity in the Sports Pages: Football and the Mass Media in 1920s Buenos Aires.” The Americas (Washington. 1944) 60, no. 1 (2003): 11–32.

Code

# create scatter plot for each term
# create scatter plot for each term
fig, axs = plt.subplots(nrows=7, ncols=2, figsize=(10, 15))
axs = axs.flatten()
for i, col in enumerate(df_fil_1942_1982.columns):
    ax = axs[i]
    ax.scatter(df_fil_1942_1982.index, df_fil_1942_1982[col], s=9, alpha = 0.6)
    #ax.set_xlabel('Document')
    #ax.set_ylabel('Frequency')
    ax.set_title(col, fontsize=10)
    
    # add regression line
    x = df_fil_1942_1982.index
    y = df_fil_1942_1982[col]
    m, b = np.polyfit(x, y, 1)
    ax.plot(x, m*x + b, color='r')
    # reduce x and y tick label font size
    ax.tick_params(axis='x', labelsize=8)
    ax.tick_params(axis='y', labelsize=8)

# adjust subplot layout
plt.subplots_adjust(hspace=0.5, wspace=0.3)

# show plot
plt.show()

Figure 4: Scatter plots for words with frecuency beyond 1000 in the whole period 1942-1982. The plot displays the trajectories of selected words with a total frequency exceeding 1000 instances in the corpus. Notice the notable decline in the occurrences per year for terms such as back, forward, and insider. Additionally, words like team, score, and crack experienced a significant decrease, while foul and club were the only terms that demonstrated an increasing frequency.

Code

# create scatter plot for each term
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 5))

# create heatmap using seaborn
sns.heatmap(df_fil_1942_1982, cmap='GnBu', ax=ax)

# set tick labels and rotation
#ax.set_xticklabels(df_freq_1942_1982.index, rotation=45)
#ax.set_yticklabels(df_freq_1942_1982.columns, rotation=0)

# set font sizes
ax.tick_params(axis='both', labelsize=10)
ax.set_xlabel('Terms', fontsize=15)
ax.set_ylabel('Documents', fontsize=15)

plt.show()

Figure 5: Heatmap with the overall frequencies across the corpus. The heatmap emphasizes the consistent presence of the words club and, secondly, record, over the decades. The term club peaked in the late 1960s and the early 1970s

4.2 Ratios

Code

df_rt_1942_1982 = pd.read_csv(r'/Users/hernanadasme/Projects/estadio_1940_1980/csv/df_ratios_1942_1982_final.csv', sep=',', index_col = 0)
df_rt_less = df_rt_1942_1982.drop(columns=['centroforward', 'line','centerforward', 'players','teams', 'shortstop', 'pitchers', 'catch'])
df_rt_less.head()#

	fighter	training	chance	sprinter	ring	lineman	forward	tackle	shot	kick	out	single	crack	referee	sport	boxing	player	standard	knockout	score	team	elgoal	jersey	coach	handicap	dribbling	record	shoot	back	insider	winger	field	second	ranking	match	club	games	foul
1942	0.011494	0.045455	0.850000	6.666667	30.250000	0.0	0.219178	0.0	23.000000	0.000000	0.206897	0.391304	6.594595	0.049296	0.133846	0.160000	0.045455	4.000000	0.000000	4.115385	0.759538	0.009225	0.042857	0.089286	0.357143	1.250000	36.500000	0.000000	0.245763	0.260000	0.500000	0.134172	0.952381	0.391304	0.677578	6.912500	0.139535	10.000000
1943	0.114583	0.021053	2.526316	1.928571	14.181818	3.0	0.210526	0.0	7.200000	0.034483	0.123288	0.426471	23.947368	0.241935	0.126365	0.000000	0.124157	3.333333	1.666667	3.562500	0.271800	0.003827	0.050000	0.108108	0.333333	0.300000	84.750000	0.500000	0.134670	0.459770	2.125000	0.097070	0.576923	0.928571	0.672819	5.986301	0.162162	8.666667
1944	0.038462	0.043011	1.061224	2.600000	78.000000	0.0	0.458904	0.0	23.000000	0.025210	0.123596	0.631579	5.872340	0.197605	0.186879	0.020000	0.089385	8.500000	0.000000	2.243902	0.356426	0.002717	0.000000	0.108247	1.714286	1.833333	18.400000	0.333333	0.159639	0.909091	0.785714	0.054745	0.777778	0.294118	0.781308	7.060000	0.142857	9.250000
1945	0.063636	0.039474	1.709677	0.571429	18.230769	0.5	0.700935	0.0	1.545455	0.013158	0.251185	0.510638	5.972973	0.372781	0.206897	0.000000	0.200924	4.500000	16.000000	5.625000	0.581560	0.002200	0.040000	0.250000	1.062500	2.000000	59.333333	0.444444	0.176056	5.916667	1.058824	0.084211	0.875000	0.347826	1.506024	10.050000	0.092593	15.500000
1946	0.000000	0.037500	1.108108	0.500000	39.600000	0.0	0.747826	0.0	2.875000	0.000000	0.142105	0.696429	2.925000	0.265700	0.161137	0.010526	0.117137	10.000000	0.000000	3.593750	0.780411	0.000000	0.200000	0.161017	2.875000	1.333333	14.523810	0.000000	0.106529	3.666667	2.933333	0.082380	1.500000	0.310345	1.406349	21.823529	0.011765	7.200000

Raw frequencies were normalized by calculating usage ratios, which involved dividing the English frequency by the frequency of its Spanish counterpart. The decreasing trend, observed in raw frequencies, was less pronounced when examining the ratios, although only one Spanish counterpart was selected for each word. For example, the word “ring” was divided by the Spanish equivalent cuadrilátero, and the ratio of the word “record” was obtained by performing a division with its counterpart registro. Overall, words that underwent adaptation into Spanish and transitioned from sports vocabulary to other domains, such as club, crack, record and sport exhibited consistent usage patterns. Figure 6 displays a scatter plot indicating the general downward trend, although less sharp than for the raw counts, of ratio usage of English terminology in Revista Estadio.

Code

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 4))


for column in df_rt_less.columns:
    ax.scatter(df_rt_less.index, df_rt_less[column], label=column, s=50, alpha = 0.5)  

sns.set_style('darkgrid')
sns.set_palette('bright')
sns.set_context('talk')

# compute the trend line for the selected columns
x = df_rt_less.index.values
y = df_rt_less.values
m, b = np.polyfit(x, y.mean(axis=1), 1)

# add the trend line to the plot
ax.plot(x, m*x + b, label='Trend line')

#ax.legend(fontsize=6)
ax.set_xlabel('Document')
ax.set_ylabel('Frequency')
ax.set_xticks(df_rt_less.index)
plt.yticks(fontsize=12)
plt.xticks(rotation=45, fontsize=12)
#plt.legend(fontsize='20')
plt.show()

Figure 6: Ratios of use of anglicisms between 1942-1982. The ratios were compounded dividing the English by its Spanish most common counterpart. term Words of general use like record (pink dot), ring (purple dot), and club (brown dot)

A view in detail of the ratios of usage of the 14 terms with more than 1000 instances shows a similar picture than the raw counts. Soccer terminology experienced the sharpest drops, while lexicons like sport, referee, and single remained relatively stable. Terms used across disciplines like team, score, and match suffered a drastic decline in their ratio of occurrence. The proportion of utilization of the words club and foul witnessed a stable ratio of appearances, and even underwent slight drop, which differs from their marked upward trend of in raw usage frequency. Figure 7 presents 14 scatter plots with the trajectories of individual terms, showcasing the marked decrease in the ratio of usage of soccer terminology.

Code

df_filrt_1942_1982 = pd.read_csv(r'/Users/hernanadasme/Projects/estadio_1940_1980/csv/filtered_ratios_final.csv', sep=',', index_col = 0)
#df_filrt_1942_1982

Code

# create scatter plot for each term
fig, axs = plt.subplots(nrows=7, ncols=2, figsize=(10, 15))
axs = axs.flatten()
for i, col in enumerate(df_filrt_1942_1982.columns):
    ax = axs[i]
    ax.scatter(df_filrt_1942_1982.index, df_filrt_1942_1982[col], s=9, alpha = 0.6)
    #ax.set_xlabel('Document')
    #ax.set_ylabel('Frequency')
    ax.set_title(col, fontsize=10)
    
    # add regression line
    x = df_filrt_1942_1982.index
    y = df_filrt_1942_1982[col]
    m, b = np.polyfit(x, y, 1)
    ax.plot(x, m*x + b, color='r')
    # reduce x and y tick label font size
    ax.tick_params(axis='x', labelsize=8)
    ax.tick_params(axis='y', labelsize=8)

# adjust subplot layout
plt.subplots_adjust(hspace=0.5, wspace=0.3)

# show plot
plt.show()

Figure 7: Scatter plots for words with frecuency beyond 1000 in the whole period 1942-1982

5 Conclusion

Why do foreign words assimilate into a local language and eventually disappear or transform into relics of a bygone form of communication? The already mentioned work Anglicisms in Chilean Sporting Language, written by Lidia Contreras at the height of anglicism borrowing in sporting printed media, provides an interesting theory of language evolution. “The spontaneous processes of castellanization –explained Contreras– will be responsible for restoring the desired nationalist balance, and foreign words will not have served to deform or denationalize our language, but to enrich it.”²³ While this research lacks access to the complex structures that determine linguistic change overtime, it can provide some insights on the historical context around those transformations. The context in which Revista Estadio’s writers worked was characterized by the consolidation of a globalized mass culture, the strengthening of Anglo-Saxon countries as an hegemonic power, the growing urbanization of traditional societies, and the rise of nationalistic modernizing projects in Latin American nation-states.

²³ Contreras, Anglicismos…, 179

This study reveals an interesting dynamic regarding the usage of sports terminology and anglicisms in a corpus of 40 years of Revista Estadio. The data indicates that English lexical borrowing peaked in the early 1940s and subsequently declined in both frequency and variety of anglicisms. Interestingly, its peak coincided with a surge in nationalist sentiment surrounding sports activities, supported by social reformers and government officials. This downward trend was especially noticeable in soccer terminology. Fútbol’s massive popularity may have privileged the use of a local language over the foreign counterpart. In addition, limitations in the use of imported jargon in neighboring Argentina, and the change of style in famous Argentine radio soccer narrators, might have contributed to the decline in soccer terminology. Media scholars have pointed out the marked influence transnational ties created by media, and the marked influence of Argentina’s broadcasting aesthetics in Chilean radio and television. The data also shows how general use of words like chance, match, club, and record may have entered the Chilean Spanish through the pen of Revista Estadio’s writers. Finally, the drop in the use of sports terminology in the early 1960s, does not mean that English lexical borrowing dropped in other areas. The adoption of English terms in other areas, such as technology, business, finance, and leisure has experienced significant growth, as the Chilean economy intensified its interconnection with the global economy in the early 1980s. The prevalence of anglicisms not only reflects the impact of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, but also signifies the consolidation of global English as a dominant force in various domains.

There are many things that are still left to be accomplished about this project. Cleaning up the corpus is still an ongoing process, due to the insufficient quality of the OCR, and it requires several hours of trial and error with different cleaning functions. The exploration of how the usage of words affected their semantic nature with the aid of Collocations, a technique that allows the extraction of sequences of words that occur together, and the examination of the weight of English terminology to perform Topic Modelling on the corpus, did not go beyond an exploratory stage, due to time constraints. The normalization of the data also requires a serious revision, as the ratio used in these studies is insufficient to capture more nuanced insights from the data. There are a myriad of tools, theories, concepts, and methodologies that can be taken from Computational Linguistics and Diachronic Vocabulary Change that would help make this research more robust, and to meet the standards of the scholarship being produced in the field of Digital History. Now that the initial leg work is done, my focus will shift towards creating a more diverse corpus that encompasses the entire twentieth century, and entails a wider range of sporting publications, tabloids and newspapers. Furthermore, I will compile an additional collection of handbooks of physical education and hygienist literature from the first half of the twentieth century, to compare sport lexical borrowing between the media and health sciences.

6 Works Cited

• Acuña, Pedro. “Playing Across the Andes: Sports media and populism in Argentina and Chile.” *Journal of Latin American Studies* 51, no. 4 (2019): 855-882.

• ——— “Transnational Sports Soundscapes: Soccer Announcers and Radio in Argentina and Chile, 1920s-60s.” *Radio Journal* 19, no. 1 (2021).

• Adasme, Hernán. “De la sujeción paternalista a la tutela institucional. La práctica y el espectáculo del boxeo en el mineral El Teniente 1915-1944.” In *El Orden Fabril. Paternalismo Industrial en la minería chilena 1900-1950*, edited by Enzo Videla, Hernán Venegas, and Milton Godoy, Valparaíso: Editorial América en Movimiento, 2016.

• Contreras, Lidia. “Los anglicismos en el lenguaje deportivo chileno.” *Boletín de filología* 7 (1952): 177-341.

• Elsey, Brenda. *Citizens and Sportsmen Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile*. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

• Funk, Kellen, and Lincoln A. Mullen. “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice.” *The American Historical Review* 123, no. 1 (2018): 132–164.

• Karush, Mathew. “National Identity in the Sports Pages: Football and the Mass Media in 1920s Buenos Aires.” *The Americas* 60, no. 1 (2003): 11–32.

• Oroz, Rodolfo. “El Castellano de Nuestros Deportistas.” *Studium. Revista chilena de cultura humanística* 3 (1927): 238-249.

• ——— *La Lengua Castellana en Chile*. Santiago: Univ. de Chile, Facultad de Filosofía y Educación, 1966.

• Ortuzar, Camilo. *Diccionario Manual de Locuciones Viciosas y de Correcciones de Lenguaje*. Santiago: Impresora Salesiana, 1893.

• Ovalle, Alex. *El viril deporte: Boxeo, modernización y cultura de masas en Chile (1904-1931)*. Santiago: Centro de Estudios Bicentenario, 2021.

• Rodríguez González, Félix. “Variaciones en el uso de anglicismos deportivos.” (2007).

• ——— “Anglicisms in contemporary Spanish. An overview.” *Atlantis* 21, no. 1/2 (1999): 108.

• Santa Cruz, Eduardo. *Prensa y Sociedad en Chile, Siglo XX*. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2016.

• ——— “Prensa deportiva y desarrollismo en Chile: el caso de la Revista Estadio.” *Revista Mapochon°* 71 (2012): 262.

• Vásquez Amador, María, Carmen Lario, and Paloma López. “Los anglicismos en la prensa deportiva de los 50.” *Estudios filológicos* 55 (2015): 157-176. https://dx.doi.org